Three pars to start had Norris in decent fettle as he took aim towards the far end of the course. Then an errant lash of his driver darkened the mood.<\/p>\n
An ugly spray from the tee screamed out of bounds on the right and he was forced to fish another ball from his bag.<\/p>\n
Reset, compose yourself, avoid that fairway bunker on the left… what bunker? That bunker you’ve just landed in. The one you took two to get out of on Thursday.<\/p>\n
At that stage, Norris was in the sand, three shots deep, and had 230-odd yards to the green. Not great, but not catastrophic. Not yet.<\/p>\n
“What was it, the fourth shot? It caught the lip,” he explained. “Then I hit the same club and tried to do the same.”<\/p>\n
He told BBC Sport that he tried to “chase something” and, three increasingly infuriated swipes later, he was still in the same bunker. <\/p>\n
It was beginning to look like he might never emerge. Like this was his life now. <\/p>\n
Finally, fuelled by the fury of a man who’s world was falling apart around him, he found just enough elevation to escape, his ball apologetically bounding 39 yards down the fairway.<\/p>\n
Norris emerged behind it. A man who had probably lost track of how many times he’d hit the ball, what hole he was on, and even what his name was. “My mind went a little bit numb,” he said.<\/p>\n
The records showed he had played seven. The pin was still the thick end of 200 yards away. Too far, as it turned out.<\/p>\n
Norris’ approach settled 20-odd yards short left. But somehow he gathered himself to chip to seven feet and hole the putt.<\/p>\n
“Shot 10. Ball holed. Double bogey or worse,” recorded the official Open shot tracker.<\/p>\n
It was worse. Much, much worse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three pars to start had Norris in decent fettle as he took aim towards the far end of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":["post-3502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}